New Market Insights ft. Jim Swift

So Mark, what do you think? Should we at least start to the kickoff?

Yeah, let's get going, Michelle.

All right, so I know a lot more people are joining, so we will make this a long intro. How about that?

Not too long.

So welcome, welcome back to our roundtable where we are bringing new thinking to you as we discover and focus on building the future of self sales, a topic near and dear to us as a problem solving firm. What we work with our clients on is bringing differentiated solutions to them to solve their biggest sales challenges.

Right?

Yeah.

And you know, as we look out at this idea called the future of sales or post Covid future of sales, the big thing for us is we don't really know what it's going to look like. So the emphasis is on, you know, what are the considerations, how do we solve this problem, how do we equip ourselves as good creative problem solvers to do this from a leadership standpoint, also from a sales organization standpoint. So we'll share some of those ideas with you as we go along here.

That's right. So every week we've been bringing fresh insights and new ideas to you. And you know, as we are rethinking and we are going to be talking about today data and we're going to talk about how it has been leveraged and how it can be leveraged as we look at the future of sales, which involves some level of virtualization.

Right, right. Let's take a look at my favorite whiteboard here, Michelle.

Yes.

And so we're big whiteboard fans, so we're always drawing stuff. And as you'll see, there's a cropping of the whiteboard around considerations around the future of sales. The couple of them we want to drill into today is what's the opportunity in the market. So we've got some new information on what's happening as we're coming out of COVID at the B2B industry level, at the company level, geographically, that'll be really helpful. And you know, as we know, Michelle, Covid hasn't affected everybody the same. So a lot of what we've been talking about is how do we re segment the market, how do we change territories, how do we refocus people on the right opportunities and what are the considerations or the questions that customers, the concerns customers are going to be going through. So getting a lay of the land and the other big area is what's the role of data driven selling? So if we can't like rely on relationship, we can't go to the golf course we can't go to dinner all the time. What our hypothesis is is that data driven selling, data driven solution development is going to become more important. So as I'm having a meeting with a customer, being able to tell them something about their industry, what's going on, how they should be thinking about how we can solve their problem, that's going to be a lot more important as well. So we'll be talk talking about that. Our guest today as well.

That's right. Oh boy, I'm glad you took that down. Every time I move I disappear. And that's exactly right. And so today I am so excited we've got someone new here with us, Jim Swift. He is CEO of Corterra which is a data analytics company. Much more than that data and insights that we're going to hear about today. And Jim calls himself a self proclaimer, proclaimed data geek is what he is and he has spent most of his life doing that which he loves best. So Jim, welcome today.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, we're really excited to have you here. So I am going to jump right into something which is something that I had read on your website and what you say about Corterra is that you are passionate about innovation and fueling the greater economy with a vision to change the world by building a better data network. I absolutely loved that statement and I've spent a lot of time with you and your team and I know you believe it. So I would love for you to tell us in your own words what that means to you and means to everyone here. Listening?

Yeah, sure. So I guess I have a passion, a quest if you will, around bringing new information about businesses because everywhere I've been my career people have been frustrated at the lack of information about companies and I got frustrated hearing about it and dealing with it. So it's become this mission of ours to try to crack that code. Most companies are private and we don't really know much about them and we've had to rely on the same old crappy data all these years. And so to us it's about two things really. One is around community. We said if we're going to go and we're going to build a breakthrough insight, we want to do it in a way where it brings the whole community together, where they share information, in some cases they have new ways to communicate and interact with each other and with the data. And the second piece is to change the way that we interact with data and really I call it democratizing data access. Data retrieval has been it's been the domain of the technology elite for a long time. And if you didn't know how to manage databases and write queries and do all of that technical stuff, you couldn't begin to get answers out of the data. And when you think of the ways that we can interact with applications on our phone and other things, it's kind of light years ahead of what we're able to do as salespeople. And especially in the B2B world, where we don't have that much access to information at the end of the day and we have to rely on other people, it's limited, it's clumsy. And so over time, we want to find ways to turn that. That into something that is as intuitive as a video game. So bringing those together, that's unique data leveraged by the community, finding new ways to deliver it out where it's really easy to access, that's what we're all about. That's what we think needs to happen.

That's a great vision. So let's discuss a little bit about how companies do get data today and what opportunities they have to do it a little bit differently as they look ahead. So, so what we know is that companies spend a lot of money, they got a lot of expense and a lot of time buying data, procuring data, sorting that which they have on their customers for segmentation, to inform things like their territories, how they set quotas, and even compensation. And yet, at the end of the day, we do a lot of segmentation work here at Sales Globe. And at the end of the day, what we find is that that data yields them very little results. Can you talk to everyone about some of the pitfalls you've seen and like, how they can really leverage the right data for their business?

Well, I think we've all been hamstrung with data. That's just not good enough. We want to understand what businesses do and how big are they. Those are two of the just natural driving forces about how we begin to think about segmentation. What do you do? How big are you? And we've had to rely on things like SIC codes and NAICS codes, which are these government codes that describe what a business does, but they're limited. A business is often many things, and at the end of the day, it's just a label. And in order to assess how big a business is, we have data that tells us about what their estimated sales volumes are and their estimated number of employees. But that can be misleading too, because a lot of times it's wrong you know, there are 6 million businesses in the US that have employees and 99.9% of them are private. They don't have to tell us what their revenues are. So we've evolved this whole culture to support sales of trying to guess, educated guesses with models on how big this business is. And then you go from company to company and almost everybody uses that data in order to come up with their segments and their targeting strategies and everything else. But it's wrong. Often we all know that we get frustrated by that and so we're missing huge pockets of companies that could be our best prospects, or we're misunderstanding who our best customers are because we're relying on that data. So to me, it all starts there. Until we have a better view of what's going on inside those businesses, we're always going to be limited in the processes around that, whether it's segmentation or, or compensation or whatever. And so we need to find better ways to understand those natural tendencies that we want, which is what does this company do and how big are they? And we need to move from that, basically a label and we need to move to behavioral data. So if you think about the consumer world, companies don't rely on just labels of people, empty nesters and white picket fencers. You know, people can have the same general characteristics but behave in fundamentally different ways. And so over time, in the consumer world, it's more consumer marketing as opposed to B2B sales. But there are a lot of parallels between the two. In the consumer marketing world, we now rely on behavioral data really driven by what people buy and what people are looking to buy. That's why Google's worth so much money. They know what we're searching for, they know what we're buying or looking to buy, and they sell advertising for that and they're worth a trillion dollars. In the B2B world, we're still sitting there with not accurate enough views of the industry our customers are in and their size. And then we wonder why we can't have more accurate tools as we start to try to do things with that data. It all starts there. If our data isn't any good, our analytics can never be any good.

Yeah, so Jim, we're used to, when we do sales effectiveness work, segmentation work, territories, compensation, the runs of data that tell you a couple things, like you mentioned the company, how many employees it has, the SIC code or the NAICS code, and it's kind of flat. But you talk about this idea of community and I just want to get a Feel for when you look at the data that you're pointing together at Corterra, what's different about that? It's contributed.

Right.

And it's more dimensional which makes it more useful.

Well, there are a lot of different aspects to this. One of the main one is spend. So in the consumer world I grew up in consumer database marketing and the use of spend information about people is what really informed everything that we did with them. Whether it was risk models or. I was on the credit card industry and we were doing firm offers of credit through the mail. You've been pre approved. And so we had to build a risk model and we had to build response models and we had to target people that were good credit risks but would also respond to our offers. And so the best way to understand that we found was in spend behavior data. You know, you buy things you can't afford your bad credit risk, you buy a minivan and you're probably buying life insurance. So there are all kinds of affinities that we found in that process. And so that's how we moved, why we moved from the labels about people into the spend behavior data. So when we started building Corterra we said what's the breakthrough insight about businesses? And I think it's the same thing. I think it's what companies buy. I think you are what you buy as a person, you are what you buy as a business, you are what you buy. If you buy steel and truckload shipping, you're probably a manufacturer. If you only buy office supplies, you're probably a services company of some kind. And how much you buy tells me how big you are. And if you buy a lot more next year than you did this year, you probably grew up so that at the end of the day becomes a lot more accurate. We can then use it to apply labels that we're used to like the SIC code or NAICS code of a business or an estimation of their revenues. But we can also look for different, more sophisticated things. So the community we've built is how we capture over $1.6 trillion now and spend between businesses. At the end of the day the B2B world is all about that purchase and ultimately the payment for the purchase. And so we've built a credit network where we capture out of $8 trillion and spend between businesses. Every year we capture 1.6 trillion and we take that and we put it in different categories so that everybody can understand the businesses interacting with. So the members of the network share information, they get insights back in an anonymized safe way that give them a better view of the businesses or the prospects that that they're dealing with as well. So that spend data is what's most important and we put it in 45 different categories and we, we look at materials that go into a business, we look at shipping related things that go out of a business. We look at things that are done inside like office supply purchases and business services and industrial supplies. So it gives us the ability to paint this picture of what's happening in the company. So just like with people, if I know the five things you spend the most money on, I can paint a pretty interesting picture of you and predict 10 more things about you. Same with businesses. If I know the top five types of things that they buy and how much and how it's changed over time, I can paint a more accurate view in understanding that business. So that helps support everything's all about selling and businesses. Ultimately we only have credit and risk processes because we have sales. If we don't sell anything, we don't need those processes. So it's all just different aspects of the same dice if you're going out to Vegas.

So really the bottom line is and why we really wanted people to hear what you have to say today is that the traditional way of pulling data and looking at how you segment. Right. So the information that you have on your customers expand your thinking and look at other data that's out there. And you guys have successfully been using buying what buying behavior is for the B2B space. And so I think this is a great opportunity for you to talk to people about what are we seeing out there. So I know that you've done a couple things recently, I know you're working with. This is kind of exciting. You've been on CNBC a couple times and now Wall Street Journal. One day you're not even going to want to talk to us anymore anyway, as you look at that. So we're lucky we got him today, Mark. We got him today. But anyway, as we look at that the spend data tell everybody here what that means to the reopening. And really more importantly, you already did start to talk about that, Jim, but what does that mean to them, to their businesses? As you've got people here that are making decisions in their companies, all different types of companies. So you've got manufacturers on the line, you've got technology companies on, you know, what does this B2B spending behavior look like and how does that inform reopenings now?

Sure. So first of all, B2B spending is really important because we tend to think of measuring the economy in terms of consumer spend. But consumer spend is only made possible by business spend. You can't go to the mall and buy something at a clothing store without a whole series of B2B interactions to happen. Behind that we have to manufacture things, we have to distribute them, we have to move them to point to point. We have all their businesses that support that. So the millions of businesses that interact and how they spend money really is what makes the rest of that work. And so when we look at the spending behavior by businesses, we can correlate it easily to employment. Because you think a business, when we did the lockdown businesses, they stopped spending as much as they could and that included laying off people, the 40 million people that lost their jobs. There was also a lot of B2B spending that went down as a result of that. Some of it you can't control, but a lot of that was shut down. And then it corresponds to the ultimate consumer spend as well. So we found that the data that we have about how businesses are spending, it describes the stress that businesses are under as they get in trouble and then the recovery. So in April we saw business spending overall in this country go down 10%, the biggest drop we've ever seen. In May, the numbers, we've got 70% of the numbers in from the May spending were four days into the month now and we're seeing 14% drop. So we're still dropping as the overall economy. But there are little areas that are, as we reopen, that are starting to bounce back up. They're mostly in retail. So manufacturing spend in this country, spend by manufacturers with other businesses is down 25%. So part of that is because they're not open. Part of that is because there's less demand. So they haven't begun to spring back yet in some areas like transportation equipment manufacturing, the automotive and the airline, not the airlines, but the aircraft industry down to over 65%. So in retail, that's where we're seeing a little bit of a bounce back. We call these bounce curves where every, every industry and every state industry combination and everything else, they have their own shape coming back. You know, U shapes and V shapes is what everyone's talking about, but it's not linear. It's not going to be like that. It's going to be some kind of strange, strange curve to come back. So we're seeing the retail sectors start to come back. Gas stations, some clothing stores, a lot of restaurants. We're seeing building materials we're doing a lot of home improvement projects, and so the Lowe's in, the Home Depots, but even the small SMB versions of those are coming back. So we're seeing that. And that ties to today's job growth report. That's where the jobs are being added. Hotels are starting to open up a little bit. Airlines. We're seeing about a 12% increase in spend by airlines. So all this is happening now. And then everyone will take on its own life as it recovers, and they'll come back to a point that hopefully is higher than it was before, but it'll be a mix. Some will never return to their past glory. Some. Some will be better, some will be about the same.

So if you, if you follow that path, then, Jim, when you Talked about the B2B transactions that go on before, something sold in a store, if things are selling through retail now, that would trigger more of those B2B transactions. So we should be able to follow the path and say, or ask the question, well, what retail is hot? What are people buying? And therefore the B2B manufacturers and suppliers that follow through on that retail channel should be doing. Start to do well also.

Exactly. So looking at the combinations of these curves within each of the supply chains is really informative. If you look at food. So we have food and beverage. Food and beverage both increased in April. The manufacturing spend, because people were drinking a lot, I guess, and they were eating as much, if not some more. And they had to spend more because they had to change the way they packaged. Because restaurants closed, their spend went way down. Grocery store spend went way up because we had to go get our food at grocery stores instead of restaurants. So manufacturers had to change their packaging from the bulk packaging that would go to a, a cafeteria or some dormitory or whatever. It had to go to small consumer packaging for an individual in the grocery store. So we saw that spend go up. In May, we're seeing that spend go back down. So grocery store spend is coming down. Restaurants are starting to ease back up. Food distributors are going down, though. Manufacturing, food manufacturing is going down. So we're seeing all these dynamics, and sometimes it predicts what will happen, and sometimes it'll highlight issues. Another one is gas stations. I mentioned we're seeing an increase in gas station spending. We're also seeing an increase in petroleum distributor spending, but we're seeing a continued decrease in petroleum manufacturing. So what's happening? Are we having a shortage where that'll create price increases at the pump? Or are we seeing the leading indicator of consumer Demand, which will then pull up the manufacturing production and we'll know, you know, we can follow these curves over time and we'll know. So this, this all goes back into how do we sell to these folks. You know, selling comes back to the capacity to buy and the readiness to buy and sic code or naics code and a guess at last year's revenues don't really give you a lot of insight. Might give you some insight into capacity to buy if they're right, but not in a readiness to buy. And so looking at more real time information and understanding your customers and how to segment your customers in different ways with data like this, it allows you to be faster to react because timing is everything.

That's extremely insightful. Thank you. I think it would be a great time. We had a lot of questions come in from listeners and it would be a great time to just take a couple of questions to ask Jim. Would anyone out there like to ask Jim a question about data?

I have one.

Michelle, this is Jeff Schmetz.

Okay, do you want to show. You can feel free to show your face or not. You can join us or not. It's okay. So we've got with us Jeff Schmidt. And Jeff is, I will tell you all, he's CEO of Avertium. Go ahead, Jeff. It's nice to see you today.

Hey, how are you guys? So thank you for inviting us here today, Jim, thanks for joining us in your time as well. I have a little bit of a selfish question and it's kind of twofold because it may play a little bit into the new norm of companies making a move to virtual or work from home environments creates new challenges, but also creates new opportunities. So when you talk about IT infrastructure and you talk about outsourced services, does this potentially also increase the. I used to like to have my IT people in the office with me, but they seem to be doing their job great remotely. So companies maybe start to shift these services that can be done fractionally or by services teams easier or maybe better or maybe just shifting focus from. I don't want to rely on internal team members. I want to be able to have a much more robust infrastructure supporting me so that maybe mid to large enterprise that didn't look at outsourced contracts start looking at different ways of supporting their business. And then the second part of that is we've been blessed to be in cybersecurity. It sucks that in bad times and good times is that there are horrible people out there that do horrible things and take advantage of people. But Cybersecurity with the work from home, with the need for secure networking has remained stable if not growing for us. Do you see cybersecurity services, not software, not where it's product, where you maybe have a slowdown in a security product, but the services angle continuing to be a stable business moving forward?

I guess I'll take the first question first. The outsourcing of network and other IT related things. I think the world was already going there with the cloud adoption and part of the reason is it's hard to find really good network people and this is related to the security as well. It's hard to find really good network people that also can handle the latest of what's going on with cyber. And so I think there's been a movement to do that and I think having your employees working from home, it's going to change that mix. They're not here in the office, especially sales teams, inside sales teams that are now remote. We've seen it's really changed the way we think about our network operations and other things. So yeah, I think you'll see more of that, but I think it'll be part of the broader push to the cloud in general. I think people realize that the virtual is okay. The stigma, the scariness about virtual is, is going away. Even with some of our banking customers, we're seeing that. And so I think that trend will continue on the cyber side. I think yeah, this is cyber is more of an issue than people realize cyber security and it's hard to stay current. So I think most companies, especially if you're a technology company, you want to have some kind of internal resource staying as current as possible. You need that ownership, you need that trust. It's the kind of thing you don't want to totally outsource but you have a technical part of it where we use consultants to help us. We use outside audit firms to do penetration testing, both physical and network driven, application driven. I think there's going to be an increasing need for that as the awareness of the threat increases. And I think another opportunity for third parties in that is around the social issue of this. You know, the social threats are in my view as great if not greater than the technical threats. You can be on top of the technical threats and have all the latest software and all the latest technology and you'd be closer to the game. But if your employees are easily duped by phishing attacks and other things, then you've got serious vulnerabilities into your operation. And that's one of the Things that is really exploding with all the work from home, because people aren't in a physical community where they can ask their neighbor about something. They're kind of on their own. They may not have a sophisticated WI fi access and other things. You got all kinds of new threats out there. And so, yeah, I think it's going to be something for the good that we all pay a lot more attention to. I think the threat's been a lot bigger than people have understood for a long time and you'll see an increase.

Thank you very much.

Appreciate it.

We'll take time, one more time to ask questions. Okay. For those of you who do not know what the COVID 19 tracker is, it was in your invitation and we'll send it out again. But again, it tells you B2B, what spend looks like across the country. And it tells it by different. By categories. Right. He talked about. I think you said 45 categories, Jim. And you can understand what that looks like.

That's what we track and that's where this data comes from. What's in the tracker. It allows you to go in and see changes in overall spending. You can't see the different types, but you can see changes in overall spending. You can see changes in the way those companies are paying. So it gives you a sense of the health. And you can break that down into, yeah, 100 different industries and there are 3,000 counties in the US so down to that level of detail, if you want. And you can see how it's changing over time. So if your customers are integrated or concentrated in a certain area, go in and take a look and see what's happening. You can see if you have any hotspots or opportunities the other way around. Look for the green ones.

Okay. And we have added that to the chat as well for everyone. All right, now we're going to shift gears and have a conversation that's near and dear to me. I'm all about people and questions that keep coming up with our clients is what is sales going to look like and how do we sell virtually and how do we make those connections? Getting to the second part of one of the pieces of our mind map, what virtual selling looks like. So, Jim, we thought it would be great to have a conversation with you about what you believe it's going to look like and how we can effectively sell virtually firstly. And then secondly, what do we think it's going to look like? You know, is it going to be all about planes, trains and automobiles? That dates me, that was an old movie, but you know, is it going to be about that? You know, what do we think? What do you believe?

Yeah, I don't know. This is where we should have an open conversation about it. But back in 2001, up until that point, we used maybe some inside sales occasionally as part of our process, but we had to pay for long distance and we didn't have a good way to show our products. And so it was really a field sales dominated world, which for a lot of things makes sense. If you're selling consulting or you're selling enterprise software, those are always going to be heavy field sales driven environments. But a lot of products were made possible around 01 because long distance suddenly became free and WebEx appeared on the scene. And so the company that I was with at the time, it was bad in 2001 if you guys were around and remembering that the world was ending between 911 and the crash of the dot com bubble. And so we were forced as a business to find creative ways to make products and go to market. And so we pivoted quickly to an inside sales driven model because all of a sudden it was cost effective. We didn't have to hop on planes and go fly around the country and wait in airports. And so that created a whole new set of competitors in different industries that enabled these products that, especially with ASP, now we call it SaaS and Cloud and all these other things. But the time we called it asp, it enabled these businesses to go and create new things. I think there's some similarities to what's going on now. I think this has been a big realization in our world that we don't have to fly. I used to spend 50% of my time on planes, on the road for years, my whole career. And all of a sudden that came to a screeching halt. And so even forced me. I'm like, wow, this is interesting. It took me a while. I wanted to be somewhere. It was just such a part of my routine. But now we're really thinking about, okay, we're, we've now broken the barrier. We're all using Zoom all the time. A lot of us didn't use it. I would go out of my way, I'd pull a hamstring before I got in a Zoom meeting. And now I love it, right? And we're finding that it's very productive. I always thought it would be unproductive with the dogs barking in the background or anything else, but it's been fantastic. And so it's not like we can just snap back to Normal, because travel is not the same right now. Our customers aren't necessarily in an office. We can't just go showing up at their house, knock on the back door, hey, sit in the kitchen and pitch them something. So what's it going to look like? So we're going to have to be successful. We're going to have to embrace either the phone or video for a period of time. And in thinking about that, why don't we just make that quasi permanent? Why don't we build really rich processes that leverage video as a core part of the way we sell? Our customers now are much more likely to hop on a demo by Zoom. And as opposed to the phone and the webex or whatever we're using, why don't we bake them together a little bit more? Maybe we can make it personal. We can see eyeball to eyeball a little more and go see them when we need to, but maybe we can be more efficient. I just think companies are going to figure it out. Some won't. They'll do it the same way and they'll be fine. Some will get bypassed and some people are going to figure out really interesting integrated ways to bring some of the things we're forced to do right now into their sales process. And we're trying to figure that out on ours on our end too.

So, Jim, it's almost like we've had a global pilot test of doing virtual selling. We've all been forced into it, obviously, and the temptation is to say, wow, look at all the money we saved. You know, all the commercial real estate we don't need to have. And, and so there's this balance, I think, of being tempted by the cost and also making sure that we're getting the right level of connection and collaboration between people as well. So I think that's probably a big consideration because a lot of companies are going to go, well, we don't need all that space, let's just cut the cost. So just your thoughts on the balance there? Because it is tempting to say, hey, we can really reduce cost and just follow through on this model.

Well, my plan is to actually put a bowling alley in our office. Oh, nice activities. It's just a running joke right here. Yeah, yeah, I think there's definitely, there's an aspect to that. You know, there's a level of cultural connection that we have to preserve in our businesses.

Right.

Salespeople, I think, are used to that a bit. Either because they're on the road, because they're home based, they found ways to Connect. So I'm more concerned about that social connection and other functions within the business, not so much the programmers because they got their own thing going on where they've got flexible hours already. But yeah, that's definitely a component of this whole thing. And I think we're going to be rethinking our travel and just the way that we interact overall with our employees, how they interact with each other and how we interact with our customers.

So if I'm a salesperson or I'm a sales manager and we talked about the data and the power of what you have in terms of the purchasing information, how could I, as a salesperson or a sales manager use that in a customer situation? If I wanted to have a more data driven solution selling type of process, what would I pull? How would I use that information to make my interactions more powerful?

I think mostly it's being more informed about the customer. There are ways now to have more intelligence going into that sales call or not have to ask them some of the questions that right now you can only learn from asking them. So I think having profiles where you understand more what's going on in the business can be awkward. Saying, hey, how's it going? Are you growing here? You can see other clues into what's going on in the business. And it's not just the spend data, it's all the other stuff people talk about, alternative data and all these things. There's so much data around. Part of our challenge is there's never going to be one data source that has it all. And so how do you knit together the data from different sources in order to be most informed? What types of data and things like news articles about businesses. How do we pull some of that in? Because there's a lot of clues in the news that give us insight into readiness to buy, especially now, you know, and they're conflicting. So you see a company that's laying off people on one side, but then they're, they're expanding a new PPE facility on another side of their business. And so you've got these different directionals that you're trying to navigate through. So being able to quickly pull this information up, be smart about who we're talking to. If I can do that on a sales call, then I can do that on my prospect base or my customer base too. Because we have the abilities to do that if I've got it on that individual company level. So to me that's the asset test. If I can walk, if I can get smarter going into a call okay, now I know this is valuable. Now I can create my segmentation models, my targeting scores, whatever else I want off of it. Yeah.

So one hypothesis we're playing with, Jim, is that it may not be the salesperson that does all this. They may not just Google a company the way they do now, but there may be some backup capability that the company has behind the scenes to prepare the salesperson with that information. Because salespeople aren't data people necessarily so making sure they know what they need to know for those sales calls and as you said, maybe combining different pieces of information together so they're better informed. So the idea would be that there is some bigger brain in the background powering or supporting the sales organization rather than the sales organization doing it ad hoc.

Yeah, I think there are a couple, couple flavors to that. One is, it's. Well, before I get going, it's shocking how little technical support we tend to give to sales organizations. We expect salespeople to learn it all themselves. Think of all the list builder tools where you have to go in and figure out, okay, give me all the companies in this industry with this revenue and how much time do you play around with that. Or you have someone who's not a deep statistician who is using those tools for your organization. Seems kind of, seems a little ridiculous. So part of it is, is, yeah, let's have somebody there. But I don't think it needs to be some giant brain in the background. I think one of the learnings I've seen is, as I mentioned from consumer database marketing, that the ways that they're using the data, it's just intuitive. It's like a, it's like a 15 year old playing Fortnite. They just get it. And so injecting someone like that into a sales ops organization can do wonders. The other thing is tools. Let's have tools that are better, have the salespeople doing as much selling as they can and support it with tools. And so our customers are across the spectrum and how they use data. We have people that will take modeling attributes and build response models and all kinds of crazy statistical models with things. Very few and far between though, but there are people at that, at that end of it. But most organizations don't have those kinds of resources. We have people that will take data, append it and use some quick rules and kind of use an axe and chop out what their segmentation needs to look like, which is way more common. And then we have people that ask us to build models for them and they're like we don't want to be in the consulting business to do that. And so we've built tools where we're think Spotify for sales leads where they can just put a name of a business in and say press a button, go give me more like that. Which is so where do you want to be on the spectrum? You want the press a button, have the genie give you more leads or do you want to go to the other end and build your own custom analytics? People are going to have to deal with that. But the tools have been across the board have been less than ideal in sales organizations.

So one of the big things I heard that's a lot for people to consider and I think really good considerations. But the one thing I heard you say is the focus is in having meaningful conversations. It's understanding more about your customer, the customer you're talking to on that call. So you go in and you have an informed conversation and not that you need to bring them all types of market insights that's good to have. But first and foremost understand where they are. And that will help you understand where they are in the buying cycle and how you can build that relationship with them.

Yeah, it depends on what you're selling. You might even be able to take the similar kind of information and talk to them about their customers. But yeah, just knowing what's going on in their business. Here's hear more clues to understand what they're doing, whether it's small talk that you're going to create on the call or whether it's really things that will help you qualify them. Before you go in, understand where the hot buttons might be, where the sensitivities might be. But it comes back to a lot of it's around spending and a lot of it's around the events going on around the business. If I can concentrate on those areas, I take it from this set of labels around a company that's this big that does this maybe and I turn it into what's really going on inside that company.

So now I would like to ask if there are any other questions because I have a couple more. I'm sure we do. But does anyone have any questions about what we have spoken with so far? We'll give you an opportunity to ask Jim. Okay, I have questions. And so you talked about, which I think is really interesting. Again, I was talking to a client today and they are having this discussion around the working from home and that environment. This has little to do about data. But about you mentioned social and building those social connections and how you continue to build the culture that you want within an organization. I thought it was really interesting that some big companies were hearing from. I believe it was Google and Facebook said they're going to completely at home working now. And you know, you think about, I think about Google and I think about a very specific culture. I had a global company asked me today how they, you know, how should they be thinking about the balance of what social even means? You know, because immediately. Right. That the. What are they thinking about in spend? They're thinking, oh my God, all this money. I'm not spending in a footprint, am I? Because my team is having lunch every week and now they're going and playing golf together. And, you know, all of it is in social. What do you think that could look.

Like, Jim, for our sales teams? So we're trying to figure that out.

Yeah.

So, yeah. So as a company, we're doing weekly town halls via Zoom now we use Microsoft Teams. And I've been, I've been pleasantly surprised at how well that's gone. So we're increasing that communication. We also have team level interactions. So with our remote salespeople, we do, we do a morning kickoff and an afternoon kickoff by video and that helps engage them and have a schedule. Because one of the hardest things about working remotely, if you're a field salesperson who's home based, you're used to it. But when you take somebody who's been in an inside role and you have them work from home now, they lose all their structure. And so having the day defined by beginning of day and end of day meetings and then having ongoing chat through the day, it's created this virtual interaction that we used to get by having them in the same area and now they're able to connect that way. How it will look going forward, I don't know. We're not really in any hurry to open. Part of it is because of the lack of clarity on what social distancing means and what the requirements are. And so we're playing it conservatively. But it's interesting and as I mentioned before, we're really trying to figure out how do we leverage this video capability with our customers in a way where our sales folks will actually use it. I don't know that there's the awareness of the potential. I think there's still a little bit of a fear about having this as part of our process. We're so used to either being able to just be on the phone or be in person, but there's a lot of potential for doing this. So in some ways the way we're thinking about it is having our people remote for even longer, being on the conservative side and being even longer at home might help us define and bake in those sales processes that will make us better.

Yep, that's about what we believe too and what we're hearing and what everyone seems to be grappling with at this point. So now I'm going to ask you a question, pretty pointed question around if I'm listening today and I'm hearing really interesting things. I, one of our listeners and I maybe do not have very good data and have been struggling with this because one of the things we know that our clients are challenged with and questions we get every day is, okay, looks like my segmentation is changing, looks like my opportunities are changing, looks like my territories could potentially change and boundaries may not matter anymore. Jim, just in your opinion, where do you believe that companies should start? How should they start looking at this? Because it can be very overwhelming.

Yeah, I think a calibration, a recalibration of your customers is probably a good start. However you do it, if you can, whether it's go pull information, whether it's talk to them, whether it's append information depending on what your skills are and what your customers look like, it's to look at your existing customers and try to see who's doing well and who's not and use different kinds of data than you have in the past. Because it's not a universal industry thing, it's not a universal customer size thing. There are pockets. So if you can again you might just call them, go call 50 or 100 customers and really understand what is it, is it because of where you are, what is it and start there and that way you're going to get a sense of what their issues are. Kind of back to basics just like you did probably a long time ago and then it became just part of your tribal knowledge that you had about your customers. But I think right now is the time to go back because some industries are never going to look the same and some are creating all kinds of new opportunities. We have customers that wouldn't change for years the way they did things and now all of a sudden they're open to hearing new things and so that can inform your go forward segmentation and strategies, I think quite a bit and priorities, you know, who do you need to try to save, who do you just need to leave alone for right now and where do you have opportunities? We're finding that I think in our world, in the technology world, bookings are soft, I think for everyone. But it's surprising how many people, how many companies are healthy and they're interested in talking about things. It's just this overall view inside the business that they're reluctant to sign long term commitments because no one knows what's going to happen in the world. But there are a lot of interesting opportunities that are new. It's great.

Can I piggyback on that, Michelle, on that point? Yes, go ahead, Jim. I'm hearing this. Data and more frequent data, better intelligence into our customers, segmentation changes, you know, all kinds of changes. And the next thing I think is, gosh, that sure does introduce an opportunity to reshuffle your sales resources and do account reassignments, etc. Have you seen any of your customers start reshuffling their sales resources and who's assigned to what account based on this data on a more frequent basis?

Yeah, I think, yeah, you're seeing, especially from a risk standpoint, but you're. But overall there's some trends we're seeing. One is that new customer acquisition is harder right now than it was two months ago. And so we're seeing some customers move more of the resources into an upsell and a customer development because they already have that relationship. It's less risk for that customer to go and do things. So we're seeing a move definitely there. I think you're going to see more moves as people figure it out from field to inside mixes. A lot of businesses have, they're either just field sales or they use inside sales in order to tee up for the field. And because it's going to take a while for Face to Face meetings to be as common as they were, I think you're going to see more of a reassignment of resources to actually closing deals on the phone. For some businesses they've been doing that for the last 10 or 15 years. But for other companies it's new. And so we're seeing more of an awareness already that oh my gosh, I gotta grow sales and I can't go be in front of that customer. So how do I get quickly good at this? And they have people that are already trained, so let's move the accounts around because now we're closing business and this whole fronter and closer model isn't what we want to do across the board anymore. Seen all kinds of different things like that, which is good. That's why it reminds me of what was going on in 01 because it forces free thinking it's like, well, wait a minute. It doesn't have to be this way. I don't have to fly across the country and spend all my time in the airport and go to the meeting and then go to Starbucks and then go back to the airport and do all that stuff. That's grueling. So, yeah, we're seeing it, but we're not. A lot of people are just trying to figure out what they do, you know, they know they're starting to see there's an opportunity because you got this looming pressure to grow revenue. It's not like we just stopped selling. And so how do we get creative with it?

That's right. Yep. Thank you. Thank you for all of that. Now we are just about out of time. Jim, thank you so much for the interesting dialogue. And for all of you that have participated, remember that we are here, Sales Globe, to help you solve your biggest sales challenges. We are continuing to look at what the future of sales looks like. Again, if you've enjoyed these roundtables, please be sure to pass the word along. And we're also. This will be part of a podcast and we'll let you know when this releases as well. Thank you again so much, all. Have a great weekend.

Love it. Thank you.

Thank you for joining us.